lone exception of Freddie aiding me when I felt faint. But any number of spies could’ve fed that to him, including whomever The Sun did send. We had to accept that Clive was free to hear whatever he liked, and draw whatever conclusions he could, from the comfort of his desk. And if Marj had her way, he’d be doing so all summer long: Her plan was to load us up on group outings to bludgeon Great Britain into believing that there was nothing to believe. Freddie, Nick, and Bex were officially open for business.
“I’ll be glad when this crisis management stuff is over,” I grumbled to Lacey over the phone. “It’s stressful. Let’s skip ahead to actual work.”
“Hmm, yes, work,” Lacey teased. “What is a duchess’s job, exactly?”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “I have no idea. My main responsibility used to be etiquette training, and now it’s Look, Everyone, We’re Not Acting Awkward. No one has told me what the next phase is.”
“Popping out a kid, I assume,” she said. “That’ll turn the tide. Come to think of it, Marj might also file that under Crisis Management.”
“My brand is crisis,” I sighed. “But hopefully we can keep my uterus out of it for a while. I am nowhere near ready for a baby. Its uncle isn’t even speaking to us.”
Freddie had seemed energized by ribbing the two of us at Hampton Court, but he’d shut down again as soon as we left. He hadn’t set foot inside Apartment 1A, and we’d learned nothing more about the mysterious Hannah beyond what we saw a week later in the papers, after he got papped hustling into Soho House with a brunette in a coat and pulled-down hat.
“Do you think we’re ever going to meet her?” I asked Nick one night as we clambered into the Den of Secrets.
“Do you think she’ll last long enough?” Nick asked, flopping down on his favorite pillows and pulling out a crossword. He liked doing them up there by candlelight (LED, so as not to burn down the monarchy in a literal sense).
“He’s definitely handling this differently, so maybe it’s serious.”
“That’d be a first,” Nick snarked. He rolled onto his stomach. “Can we please leave Freddie and all his bullshit downstairs?”
“But if you need to—”
“I don’t, Bex.” His forcefulness seemed to surprise even him. He softened. “And Sex Den is our time.”
I laughed off the tension. “It’s Den of Secrets, not Sex Den.”
“That seems like semantics,” Nick said. “But we should sort that out before I have the sign made.”
I watched him start to work on his crossword, as if the cloud had never passed over us. Since we’d come back, his resistance to discussing anything deeper than Georgina’s cavalcade of artifacts had only increased. If I pushed, he might freeze me out completely; if I let it go, I might miss a window. At a loss for answers, I started opening cabinets willy-nilly, as if the solution would fly out at me.
“Oooh, a feather boa.” I tossed it at Nick, who wrapped it around his neck without even looking up from his crossword. I picked up a small hardbound book that had fallen out along with two silk scarves and a loafer, and flipped through the pages. It appeared to be a diary.
“Hot damn,” I said. “Georgina lives.”
I opened to a random page near the middle, and read aloud:
is SO tiresome. Ellie and I teach ourselves more from reading the newspapers. And today when we asked to go outside to run about a bit because it had FINALLY stopped raining, he said that nice young ladies don’t run, and yesterday he told Ellie that princesses don’t need opinions which I think is MOST disrespectful. MY opinion is that he’s a cow-faced BORE and so I drew him that way while his back was turned to do some maths on the board and Ellie laughed out loud and we both nearly got our ears boxed. And later Ellie felt really guilty because Granny always tells us not to speak rudely about people (even though Granny speaks rudely about people all the time!!!!) but I told her we weren’t speaking about him at all and I think she felt better because she fell right to sleep. I don’t know what Ellie would do without me. She is still snoring terribly though and it’s driving me mad. It’s going to be very embarrassing for her when she gets married.
Nick burst out laughing. “That is amazing,” he said. “It’s